Author Archives: nmaynes1

There comes a time when you just need to take a little off the top of a file, see what you are working with. That is where knowing how to use a utility like head can help. Just running: $ head filename.txt Will get you Print the first 10 lines of each FILE to standard […]

Imagine a scenario where one party wants to check whether a name they have exists in a list of names kept by the another party. But I do not want the other party to know what name I am searching. This problem may seem unrealistic but imagine a data breach where tons of personal information […]

Collecting memories from people is an excellent way to celebrate the experience of others. I have found it helps me learn more about why people hold certain beliefs, how they overcame hardships, and the world we live in. Interviewing other people has helped me learn more about myself, which is why I wanted to write […]

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is one of the best features on Windows 10. It makes development so much easier than it used to be but still has a few hiccups. Kinda like Linux, some things don’t “just work.” One pesky thing is getting SSH to work with a keypair file from WSL. This post details how to get SSH working on WSL.

Below are some notes on getting kafkacat installed on an Amazon workspace with admin access. The commands listed on the GitHub page will not work without a little preparation. A Linux Amazon Workspace image is based on Amazon Linux. Attempts to use a package manager like yum go through a plugin, amzn_workspaces_filter_updates. This filter only […]

I have been working on collecting a family’s oral history for the past few months. During the process I took notes with simple descriptions of what the speaker was describing or telling and a rough timestamp of when in the file the conversation took place. After collecting hours of stories, I realized that having a […]

Once a year I need to free up space on my work machine. Once a year I find myself searching for an efficient way to identify the largest files that I do not need any longer without installing third party software. Here is the solution I stumbled on this year and it couldn’t be simpler. […]

Recently, I have been working with the Requests library in Python. I wrote a simple function to pull down a file that took more than a minute to download. While waiting for the download to complete I realized it would be nice to have some insight into the download’s progress. A quick search on StackOverflow […]

The experience of seeing red is so familiar to those who have experienced it. And that type of experience, one which is difficult to communicate, does not change based on other experiences, is unique to the individual experiencing it, and immediately recognized, is qualia.